Battlefield 3: Notes From the Field
I've been enjoying Battlefield 3 for a few weeks now and there's no denying the improvement in game play and visuals afforded by the Frostbite 2 engine. Visuals are vastly improved and game physics provide an experience that easily surpasses any previous Battlefield title.
Navigation between the various game modes is a simple process using the web based control panel and player statistics are always close at hand. Finding friends online for both co-op and online multiplayer modes is a simple matter of typing their name into a search box.
Being the half-wit blogger I am, however, it's impossible for me to leave out a few quirks I've found with the game. Rabid fans of the franchise would be advised to stop reading at this point.
For the majority of fans of the Battlefield series some of the issues I'll report may be of no consequence. Still, I'm positive that I'm not alone in my annoyances some of which have plagued the series since Battlefield 2.
Let's get started.
I have an observation, most players of Battlefield 3 stink at flying Helicopters. I can't blame the players, however. The Battlefield series has always been weak when it came to flying non-fixed wing aircraft. Battlefield: 1942 primarily had airplanes, there was a helicopter in the Secret Weapons expansion but few ever tried it. The Desert Combat mod for that game had an excellent choice of helicopters and with some practice it was possible to become proficient.
Something happened between The DC combat mod and Battlefield 2. Helicopter control was nowhere near the same as the BF:1942 mod. That was strange since the majority of the BF2 development team at Dice also worked on the Desert Combat mod.
With Battlefield 3 history is repeating itself.
The franchise has always had a dizzying amount of control options that generally take at least 20 minutes of your life before you attempt to fly or drive anything. In BF3 you can set up on foot, vehicle, airplane, helicopter and common controls. The issue is that the game sets certain default controls based on what it thinks you're using as a control device.
Getting rid of those defaults can be a challenge. For me it's the annoying tendency for the game to see my Wingman Attack joystick as a gamepad. Convincing it otherwise has involved having to manually clear every individual setting in every category. I'd have hoped that went away after BF2 but it hasn't. There's an option to reset controls to default but that just brings back the erroneous settings you started with.
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